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I first heard about this through Vitae: BioWare writer Jennifer Hepler has been viciously attacked by gamers for, among other things, not being a gamer herself, and for suggesting that a game that skipped combat in favor of dialogue might be interesting.

Oh, the fury they came up with in their intolerant, ultimately impotent haze, blasting away with remarks like “obese cunt” and “the cancer that is killing Bileware”. (To that one, BioWare studio GM Aaron Flynn responded with “whatever, fucking moron”, which naturally only served to rile the fucking morons up even more.)

Unfortunately, this is far from uncommon. A certain segment of gamers feel that they are incontrovertibly correct on every matter and that their opinions are universal truths; that anyone they don’t like, they can simply bully out of existence; that women, specifically, don’t belong in game development or as gamers (which makes it even sadder that this phenomenon includes some women). For the purposes of this post I’ll refer to them as Always Right Girl Hounders, or ARGH, which you may feel free to pronounce as an acronym and not an initialism.

This incident with Jennifer Hepler is simply the latest salvo in ARGH’s war against things they don’t like in gaming (including women). I know you’re familiar with them; they’re the sort of person whose argument boils down to “I’m right and you’re stupid”, only they’d probably use a term for “stupid” that belies their lack of respect for their target. (“Retarded”, maybe, or “a fucking loser”. Or “a cancer”.)

I have a theory, though, as to why ARGH are the way they are. It comes down to correctness and the unconscious conflation of morality and knowledge. Most of these people have gone through a system where correctness is rewarded and incorrectness isn’t remedied but instead punished: the modern educational system. Because of class sizes, curriculum requirements, and other exigencies of modern classrooms, when tests are graded, students who did well are rewarded with high grades – but students who did poorly are given no chance to correct themselves and try again. They are simply told that there is one right answer, and they didn’t know what it was. Moreover, many teachers attach moral value to higher grades, and shame students who got something wrong.

The students are therefore taught that being correct is morally correct, and being incorrect is shameful.

Additionally, students are taught that there is one correct answer, and that not having the authority’s single correct answer is to be incorrect, which is shameful.

So when these students are removed from that situation and placed in a situation where there are multiple correct answers – for example, opinions about video games – three thoughts flash through their minds:

1. Only one of these opinions can be correct.2. Holding an incorrect opinion is shameful.3. I believe that my opinion is correct; therefore anyone who holds a different opinion is shameful.

And they attack. Since the person who disagrees with them already is shameful, it’s an invitation to add further shame to the mix. Since the person who disagrees with them already is shameful, it’s an excuse to be as mean-spirited as possible – after all, if they didn’t want to be called an “obese cunt”, they would have had the correct opinion in the first place.

It’s even worse because ARGH is doing this over the internet – where it’s incredibly easy to find people who believe as they do and where it’s incredibly easy to remain semi-anonymous and insulated from retaliation.

They attack, because there can be only one correct opinion and obviously they have it, and they destroy as much as they can so that when they’re done, all that will remain are opinions that agree with them.

Don’t get me wrong – Star Wars: The Old Republic gets a lot of things right. The voice acting, companions system, storylines, and combat are top-notch (although I’m pretty sure the Republic Trooper’s basic intro storyline was lifted from Die Hard 2). But there are a lot of things SWTOR gets wrong too – aspects of the game that very, very nearly break it.

No way to disable auto-self-cast. If you use a healing ability or a buff and you don’t have a friendly target selected, the ability gets used on you. Period. This is merely frustrating in solo play – for instance, when you’re trying to heal a tank companion – but it’s nearly game-breaking in groups, since of the many ways MMOs have given us to heal people, “1) manually select heal target. 2) cast healing spell.” is the least efficient and most clumsy.

Very limited ways to see your target’s target. This is largely a tank-focused complaint; it’s very difficult to see what your target has selected as its target. (It’s true that there’s a circle on the ground under your target’s target, but that becomes almost impossible to locate when you have more than three participants in a fight.) Not being able to tell what your target is targeting makes it exponentially more difficult to make sure you’re keeping aggro on everything – again, especially in large melees, when you can’t necessarily tell which direction each mob is facing.

No way to rearrange the user interface. Largely a matter of preference, yes, but this makes my list because by default, the chat box overlaps the left-hand action bar on a widescreen monitor. Ugh.

Poor event-collision detection. Here’s what I mean: during combat, you see that your tank companion is handily dealing with all of the creatures attacking you, so – since the quest calls for you to search the corpse at your feet – you decide to get that done with while your tank is finishing off the rest of the NPCs. You right-click the corpse, wait for the “Gathering…” bar to complete, and then, when it finishes, you get an error message: “Cannot perform this action while fighting.” The game doesn’t check when you start the action; it doesn’t check during the action; it only checks at the end of the action. This means that it’s not only possible but easy to waste quite a bit of time mistakenly gathering during combat because the game won’t tell you you can’t until the gathering “cast” is over. But this leads into…

Prohibiting user actions during combat. User actions like gathering from nodes, opening chests, or interacting with quest objects. This comes very close to actively encouraging griefing and node-stealing – because if you’re fighting the mobs around a node and someone else decides to come and gather it, there’s literally nothing you can do about it except ask them to please not. The game will not let you let the tank deal with the mobs so you can pick up the Dielectric Stem or open the Security Chest.

An Auction House system that borders on actively hostile to players. Want to buy something from the auction house? I hope you can guess which broad category BioWare’s decided to place it in, and then what narrow category it goes in within the broad category – because you can’t even search by name until you’ve selected a primary and a secondary category. This not only makes buying difficult, it makes selling difficult, because it adds unnecessary extra steps to the process of finding out what the current average price is. (It’s especially difficult for selling because very often the seller’s reaction is “I don’t know what the hell kind of item it is, I just want to see what I can get for it!”.)

And finally, no same-sex romance options. Really, BioWare? You thought this would fly?

A final note, by the way: I’ve seen people saying “well, you can’t expect SWTOR to have all the features in it at launch that WOW has seven years in.” While I disagree – the state of gaming is the state of gaming regardless of whether the game was released in 2004 or this year, and you don’t judge a car company’s new line against the Model T – I’m not comparing these features with WOW, to be honest.

I’m comparing them with Rift.

And Rift got them right at launch, nearly a year before SWTOR shipped. (Even the last one! Check out Kira Thanos and Uriel Chuluun. ♥) This stuff is ridiculous, BioWare. Fix it.

I see you flyin’ away with the herb I want,
And I’m like, Fuck you
I guess me fightin’ on it wasn’t very important
I’m like, Fuck you, and fuck that node too
I said, “If I hadn’t fought it
I woulda got it”
Ha, now ain’t that some shit
And although I didn’t skill up
I still wish you good luck
With a “Fuck you!”

Well, I regret
I’m not a goddamn egret
I guess I picked the wrong damn class
You can take that Stormvine
That should have been mine
And shove it up your – well, you know where

I pity the fool
Who fights for herbs with you
(Oh shit he’s a node stealer)
Well
(Cat, bear, moonkin or healer)
Ooooh, I got some “nodes” for you
Yeah, just flag one time, I’ll be waiting

I see you flyin’ away with the herb I want,
And I’m like, Fuck you
I guess me fightin’ on it wasn’t very important
I’m like, Fuck you, and fuck that node too
I said, “If I hadn’t fought it
I woulda got it”
Ha, now ain’t that some shit
And although I didn’t skill up
I still wish you good luck
With a “Fuck you!”

I guess in the grand scheme
One herb ain’t a big thing
There’s lots of other nodes to farm
But I’m tryin’ to level
My professions
And you stealin’ does me some harm

I pity the fool
Who fights for herbs with you
(Oh shit he’s a node stealer)
Well
(Cat, bear, moonkin or healer)
Ooooh, I’ve got some “nodes” for you
Oh, I really hate your ass right now

I see you flyin’ away with the herb I want,
And I’m like, Fuck you
I guess me fightin’ on it wasn’t very important
I’m like, Fuck you, and fuck that node too
I said, “If I hadn’t fought it
I woulda got it”
Ha, now ain’t that some shit
And although I didn’t skill up
I still wish you good luck
With a “Fuck you!”

Now druid, druid, druid,
Why you wanna get me in such a mess?
I tried to tell a GM
But he said “It ain’t against TOS”
And I’m like
Uh
Why?
Uh
Why?
Uh
Why, druid?
I wanted it
I fought for that heeeerb

Ohhhhh

I see you flyin’ away with the herb I want,
And I’m like, Fuck you
I guess me fightin’ on it wasn’t very important
I’m like, Fuck you, and fuck that node too
I said, “If I hadn’t fought it
I woulda got it”
Ha, now ain’t that some shit
And although I didn’t skill up
I still wish you good luck
With a “Fuck you!”

…WoW’s latest expansion, Cataclysm, only raised the level cap by 5 levels, in addition to the other content it added. Was Blizzard right to make this call?

My answer:

Yes.

Given the nature of the expansion and Blizzard’s current philosophy regarding characters and how we spend time in-game, I believe their decision to make the level cap 85 instead of 90 was unequivocally the right one.

At Fun In Games, Naithin points out that “each level felt about right in terms of the content it consumed”, and I agree wholeheartedly. Getting from 80 to 81 felt about as long as it should have – and keep in mind, here, that I’m saying this having just leveled my Death Knight from 73 to 82. I know that the XP curve from 71 to 80 was just dramatically reduced, but even so, 80-81 didn’t feel like a brick wall the way 70-71 (or 60-61, back at the beginning of Burning Crusade) did.

80-81 felt right, and honestly, if we’d had the same amount of content but twice as many levels, we would have felt like they were just throwing levels at us – or, if they increased the XP required per level, like we were hitting that brick wall. (84-85 already requires nearly ten million XP!)

The amount of content is important, too, because when people are considering how short they feel the top-level game is, they’re forgetting that the top-level game isn’t the entirety of the expansion. In fact, truth be told, the new content for 81-85 is in the minority of the new content added for Cataclysm. We have two new races, with associated starting zones; moreover, the entire face of the old world has changed, with new layouts, new quests, and new storylines.

In other words, this is not just an expansion for characters 80-85. This is, primarily, an expansion for characters 1-85. Blizzard has made it clear – between the new races, the shallower leveling curve, the newly-redone zones and quests, Recruit-A-Friend, and certain perks like getting mounts at level 20 – that they actively want us to be leveling alts. If we focus only on the benefits to our level-capped characters, we are no longer playing the game Blizzard wants its players to play.

The bottom line: Cataclysm offers plenty of 80-85 content and provides it at the right pace, and Blizzard’s intent is that we get to 85 and then roll a new character. So yes: five levels are enough.

Nashoda is now level 30, and has outpaced the rogue (Tiryns) who was my “dedicated alt”.

Poor Theande is still level 81. I finished a level in Vashj’ir and decided to let her sit for a week, until the new-content hubbub had died down and there weren’t 40-50 people at a time looking for snails and eels.

I haven’t done any of the new instances yet, and pretty much all of my epics have been replaced by quest greens (sigh…), but at least Theande looks decent.

Introduction

I’ve been back in World of Warcraft for a few weeks now, but for some reason I’m just not feeling my high-level characters. I can’t get the hang of being a priest again, and I don’t actually play my death knight any more (and wasn’t much good when I did play), so I’ve been looking for other things to do while I get the hang of the game again.

At a friend’s suggestion, nearly all of my alts have Herbalism and Skinning as their primary professions, on the theory that if I’m just leveling, there’s no real point in spending time leveling a production profession when I could be making money with the herbs and skins that I run across. So when I started leveling my rogue, true to form, I picked Herbalism and Skinning, planning to mail the materials I gathered to a bank alt each time I headed back to town.

But I noticed something odd when I started gathering herbs – I was getting experience for gathering! I’m sure this was in a patch note that I missed, but I was particularly started to discover it. The fact that I could get XP from herbs (and mining, I assumed, but apparently not skinning) really stuck in my head, and between that and the fact that I play mostly on an RP server, therein was born a project.

Meet Nashoda

Nashoda is a night elf druid and, in-character, a pacifist. She has struck a creature only once (I wasn’t paying enough attention and a boar walked in front of the herb I was trying to collect). She has no kills to her name, and no quests completed. (Well, one quest: I have the Wrath collector’s edition, and picking up the Frosty pet from that has a quest associated with it for some reason.) Instead, she has Herbalism and Mining, and she’s leveled exclusively through gathering professions and exploration.

And as of about an hour ago, she’s level 20.

I chose a night elf druid both for the roleplaying aspects – it’s easier for me to envision a pacifist druid than any other class – and for the gameplay aspects. As a druid, I have access to healing spells (for when creatures attack me while I’m traveling or gathering), travel form, and – in cat form – the ability to stealth; as a night elf, I have an increased chance to dodge and Shadowmeld, which now drops combat if I’m not in a group, and both of those are excellent for dealing with creature attacks. Herbalism gives me Lifebloom, adding to my healing repertoire, and Mining gives me Toughness, another defense mechanism. Nashoda has trained no offensive abilities (except Wrath, which all druids start with) and carries a “walking staff” (for the Stamina/Intellect bonus).

I’ve spent most of my time in Elwynn Forest; Teldrassil doesn’t have any ore, and Elwynn is open enough that it’s easy to make circles around it. At very early levels, I stuck mostly to the mountains around the edges – there are fewer creatures there to avoid, and quite a few earthroot and copper nodes to level on – but as Nashoda’s grown, I’ve moved farther into the forest proper. Part of me feels like I ought to be moving on to other zones, but the way XP from gathering works, peacebloom, silverleaf, and copper ore still offer enough XP per gather, and Elwynn’s nodes are so dense, that it’s actually still more efficient for me to make my rounds around Elwynn Forest. (The extra XP from higher-level herbs and ore is outweighed by the fact that in the zones I can get to, there aren’t as many of them; my XP per hour is still higher from the lower-level herbs and ore.)

The Future

I’m not sure how long I’m going to continue playing Nashoda, but I’d like to see if I can make it to 85 without killing a single creature or completing a single quest. It’ll take a while – right now I’m averaging roughly a level every hour and a half, and if that keeps up I’ll have about five and a half days /played when I hit 85 – but I like the implications. (I may also go for the Explorer achievement, since I’ll be doing a lot of circles around a lot of zones…)

(And if anyone from Blizzard is reading, “the Pacifist” as a title would be a nice Christmas present. ;)

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to leave them in the comments here, to find me on Twitter as @etherjammer, or to find me in-game as Nashoda of Moon Guard-A. :)

Wake up in the mornin’ feelin’ like V. Wrynny
Got my totems, I’m out the door, I’m gonna hit this city
Before I leave, brush my teeth with a pint of the Captain
‘Cos when I leave for my BG – comin’ back? that ain’t happenin’

I’m talkin’ Stamina on our hats, hats
Lookin’ at all of our stats, stats
B.net blowin’ up our chats, chats
Group-queuin’, playin’ our MP3s, 3s
Zonin’ in as a party
(Might be a little bit tipsy…)

Don’t stop ’til it pops
GM, buff my class way up
Tonight, I’mma fight
‘Til my honor’s all right
Tick tock, queue goes up
but the BGs don’t stop, no

Ain’t got a care in the world, but I got plenty of Dew
Ain’t got no gold in my pocket, ’cause it’s on my bank toon
And now the n00bs are lining up ’cause they hear we can pwn
But we kick ’em to the curb, we only run with our own

The venerable Lightwell has been the victim of more than its fair share of criticism, all of which boils down to this: it’s a healing spell that requires its target’s participation to the exclusion of other activities. Healthstones, healing potions, etc. don’t require that the person using them de-select their current target in order to use them. This was particularly galling for rogues, who, in classic WOW, lost their combo points when they switched targets – and even though that’s apparently changed, first impressions make a lot of difference.

However, Lightwell isn’t inherently a bad spell. It just has a bad reputation. Since we know Blizzard is keeping it for Cataclysm, here are three ideas for fixes that improve the usability of Lightwell without impairing its intent.

Lightwell 1: No target switching

Lightwell creates a holy Lightwell. Friendly players can click the Lightwell to restore 4620 health over 6 sec. Clicking the Lightwell does not change your current target or trigger the global cooldown. Attacks done to you equal to 30% of your total health will cancel the effect. Lightwell lasts for 3 min or 10 charges.

This is the smallest change, but might be the hardest to implement: Lightwell no longer transfers your target when you click it, and doesn’t require a GCD. This makes it quite a bit more attractive to DPS and tanks, who no longer have to stop DPS in order to receive healing from the Lightwell. (They do still have to be near the Lightwell, however, which makes traveling mobs difficult.)

Lightwell 2: Buffing

Lightwell creates a holy Lightwell that radiates healing energy. Friendly players within 20 yards of the Lightwell receive the Lightwell Radiance buff; removing this buff heals the player for 4620 over 6 sec. Players who trigger this effect become Enlightened and cannot be affected by Lightwell Radiance for 30 sec. Lightwell lasts for 3 min or until 10 players have become Enlightened. Attacks done to you equal to 30% of your total health will destroy the Lightwell.

This removes the need for clicking on the Lightwell altogether. It does remove finding and removing a buff, but my recollection is that there are macros that can do that; in fact, I suspect that if this version went live, there’d be a UI mod that added a “Trigger Lightwell!” button dead center on your UI.

Addons and macros aside, the advantage to clicking a buff rather than clicking the Lightwell is that you know where your buffs are. Part of the problem with Lightwell is that sometimes you have to hunt it down, or it’s in the middle of the boss, etc. By making it a buff to be clicked, positioning of the Lightwell only matters insofar as you’re within its buff radius.

Lightwell 3: Auto-healing

Lightwell creates a holy Lightwell that radiates healing energy. Every 6 seconds, Lightwell heals the friendly player within 20 yards with the lowest health for 4620 over 6 sec. Players healed by Lightwell become Enlightened and cannot be healed by the Lightwell for 15 sec. Attacks done to you equal to 30% of your total health will destroy the Lightwell. Lightwell lasts for 30 sec.

This takes all of the interaction out of Lightwell. Instead of requiring DPS to trigger their own healing, Lightwell becomes a hands-off smart heal. While I do like the interactive aspect of the first two versions, I also like how this version of Lightwell becomes a complement to Prayer of Mending.

What do you think?

Are any of these worth pursuing? Should Blizzard just get right of Lightwell altogether? Or do you like it the way it is?

I know that keeping the names of various abilities straight isn’t easy, especially when there are so many of them. But I think we can pretty much all agree that we’re never going to see priests casting Presence of Mind. Thus:

POM (or PoM if you’re feeling pretentious) is Prayer of Mending.

PROM is what you attended when you were a junior and senior in high school. (Or will attend, if you want to make me feel old.)

We don’t need “ProM” to distinguish our healing spell from the mages’ self-buff. Nobody’s actually going to make that mistake. Yes, a mage can occasionally have POM and POM on at the same time, but here’s a protip: it doesn’t actually matter unless you’re making the point that you can have POM and POM on at the same time.

Remember: POM is a spell. PROM involves formalwear. You can remember this with this simple mnemonic: “R is wRong.”

The Reason That The Arguments In Favor Of RealID Doing Exactly What Blizzard Wants It To Are Missing The Mark: a play in three acts.

DRAMATIS PERSONAE

BOB, a person who loves flowers.
ALICE, a person who grows flowers.
LINDA, a mutual friend who doesn’t really speak for either of them.

ACT ONE

BOB: Boy, it sure would be nice to have some roses around the house.
ALICE: Growing roses sounds like an interesting idea! I’ll see about it for next year’s garden.
LINDA: I can’t wait to see Alice’s roses!

ACT TWO

BOB: Hey, did you get around to planting those roses?
ALICE: I’m working on it! I think you’ll be really excited when you see them.

ACT THREE

ALICE: Hey Bob, here are your tulips!
BOB: These are great, but I was really looking for roses.
LINDA: Shut up! These are what Alice wanted to grow.
BOB: Okay, but they’re really not what I wanted OR what I asked for.
Alice is silent.
BOB: I guess Alice never actually SAID she was planting roses, and I should be grateful for getting anything at all, but I’m just not as fond of how tulips look.
LINDA: Just don’t use them if they’re not what you wanted.
BOB: That’s not… it doesn’t have to be black and white. I’m just saying, I was hoping for roses, not tulips.
LINDA: Why can’t you get it into your head that you don’t always get what you want?
BOB: Okay then.